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From: rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Permissions for new user
Message-ID: <47965@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 22 Aug 90 20:28:20 GMT
References: <1990Aug20.225241.3797@agate.berkeley.edu>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony)
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Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
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In article <1990Aug20.225241.3797@agate.berkeley.edu> solovay@cartan.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Robert M. Solovay) writes:
>Recently I added a new account for my son who is visiting. The problem
>is that he seems to lack certain crucial permissions that the "me"
>account has. For example, he couldn't read the file "article.sty"
>which is needed by the latex program until I "chmod"ed it so that
>"other" as well as "user" and "group' could use it. Also, when one
>gives the su command from his account, one gets a permission denied
>message; from the "me' account one gets a request for a password.

>So my question has two parts:1) What groups other than "other" does
>"me' belong to; 2) How do I give the new account membership in these
>groups as well.

There are a couple of possible errors/bugs/problems that might be the
case here:

a) sometimes the usermanager seems to give an arbitrary group to a
new/modified account, it happened more than once that after changing
some information, I suddenly had bin as my primary group. This is a
BUG.

b) me, as it is intended to be the only account on a single user
system that works for UNIX-unaware users, has a lot of privileges that
a normal user account should not neccessarily have. e.g. it is member
of the group wheel. Some protections of files are set incorrectly, as
far as I know. This can also create problems.

c) using su is allowed for everybody, unless it is used to su to root,
in which case you have to be in the wheel group. If you want to give
this privilege, then make at least sure that wheel is not the primary
group, because files created by this user also have the wheel group
which might cause some problems...

To add more groups to an existing user, you need to use either the
nidump niload pair of programs or use netinfomanager. 
With nidump you can create a UNIX-style ascii file that looks like the
/etc/group file. You just append user names to the end that starts
with the group you want to be in. With niload you can load it back
into the netinfo databse.
If you use netinfomanager, just add the names of the users to the
/groups/GROUPNAME entry under the users property. At the latest after
a reboot all the changes should take effect.

To look in which groups you are just issue the groups command in any
shell or terminal window.

I hope this helps.

Ronald

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man."  Bernhard Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@browncog.bitnet